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Before you blog, before you create a social media strategy of any sort, you need to listen. By listen I mean tune into the truckloads of relevant industry content that’s being put out there, filtered and aggregated for your review. If you’re going to do that you want to start by following some of the top blogs that pertain to your industry.
Alltop is a site that aggregates only the top (I know, that’s a bit subjective) blog posts from around the Internet and puts them in one place for you. They started out with some of the most natural categories such as marketing and small business but recently grew to add just about any category you might want to research - adoption to yoga.
This is a great pit stop on your way to tuning in, networking, getting smarter and discovering your own social media play.
Comments
This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 at Jul 23, 08 | 6:23 am and is filed under Blogging, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
Hi John!
Alltop is a wondeful site1
{Even if the staff DIDN’T add two of my blogs and sites…hahaha}
These:
http://www.FranchiseFollies.com -under Humor
http://thefranchiseking.typepad.com -under Small Business
Hope to see ya soon, John.
Joel Libava
The Franchise King Blog
Definitely on target. Alltop basically leverages the wisdom of the crowds concept, so if the crowd says that something is important, then it must be.
Alltop has a nice iPhone optimized version of its site. Nice for a quick check on the go.
Alltop is a really nice resource. It almost takes the place of my RSS aggregator.
I got my site featured in the SEO category and I don’t really see too much traffic from them, but they sure do take some bandwidth.
Guy is super nice and he’s got a great angle. I visit Alltop almost everyday.
Guy is probably top in the game of listening and being proactive to what users are asking for. Frienderati? Utterati? Nice work. Duct Tape-rati?
When Guy contacted me to be featured on alltop, how could I possibly have said no?!
I agree with Greenville SEO, great guy, great resource and cool concept.
This was awesome! There is so much out there- in here? - in the internet, I truly can’t keep up. It takes some time to look at “stuff,” and filter it through my business needs, my time constraints, even the time I need to play with George our parrot. I had never heard of Alltop until this blog, John; looked it over and find it has great value. Thank you for all the info you share. - Linda
Disclosure first, I guess I’m a competitor (of very loose sorts) to Alltop, having just launched my meta/aggregate blog this week, strictly covering the internet marketing, seo and professional blogger spheres.
In favor of Alltop is the fact that it’s got a great, clean interface, covers a ton of areas and specializes, generally, in the top blogs for a given area. But it seems like a straightforward feed aggregator for pre-selected blogs. That’s fine, there’s certainly a place for that.
My biggest problem with Alltop is when I go to a page I care about, say SEO. There’s no structure to it, other than by blog. So I end up feeling overwhelmed by the page full of links I’m presented with. I could spend hours following all the links and hope that not too many are offtopic or irrelevant to me.
We took a different approach on our site. First of all, we track well over a hundred blogs every day, from the obvious to less so. We’re basically willing to track a blog for 1-2 months and drop it if the content is underwhelming.
We read every post of every blog we track. Each day we post our favorite links with commentary or analysis as appropriate. So just because Blogger X is a big name blogger, we won’t cover the countless off topic or promotional posts, and instead favor a less known blogger with something worth saying.
Our hope is that our site becomes a worthwhile part of a blogger’s day.
Feel free to check it out and let me know how you think we’re doing, and whether you agree with my comments regarding Alltop & ourselves.
Best,
Dex
http://www.metamakemoneyonline.com/
Dex,
We couldn’t handle your approach because we have too many topics to monitor in the way that you do. Our solution is to let people hide feeds that don’t cut it for them by clicking on the “x” next to their names.
To each his own. It’s a big pie. We can both have more than enough to eat!
Guy
Nice site! Simple interface, with no frills or fuss. What you see is what you get. Am very fond of Technorati myself, but Alltop is on my list of bookmarks now. Thanks for sharing, John.